President Trump’s former longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, is prepared to tell special counsel Robert Mueller that then-candidate Donald Trump knew in advance about the June 2016 Trump tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Fusion GPS associate Natalia Veselnitskaya and several other individuals – including Cohen, who says he was there, reports CNN.
The claim that Trump knew, if true, would contradict denials by Donald Trump Jr. and other administration officials who have previously said that Donald Trump was unaware of the meeting. The sources say that Cohen does not have evidence to support this claim, but that he is willing to attest to his account.
According to people who have discussed the matter with Cohen, he has expressed hope that this claim about the Trump Tower meeting will help him reach out to Mueller and possibly lessen his legal troubles. He’s under scrutiny by federal prosecutors in Manhattan after Mueller referred Cohen’s case to them. –CNN
President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani said of Cohen: “He’s certainly a source that is not credible.”
On July 12 of last year, Trump said of the meeting that he “only heard about it two or three days ago,” while one week later repeating that he “didn’t know anything about the meeting” because “nobody told me” about it.
Perhaps the largest denial of Trump’s knowledge, however, comes directly from Donald Trump Jr., who said during Congressional Testimony: “He wasn’t aware of it,” adding “And, frankly, by the time anyone was aware of it, which was summer of this year, as I stated earlier, I wouldn’t have wanted to get him involved in it because it had nothing to do with him.”
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